Why the Bataclan Theatre?

The Bataclan theatre, where the worst of the Paris attacks was staged, is a nineteenth-century music hall embedded in a block facing Boulevard Voltaire in a dense, culturally-mixed neighborhood.    It couldn’t be more classically Parisian in design or in use.  Most of the façade is inhabited by Café Ba’ta,clan that offers patrons a sidewalk salon of wicker chairs and tables on the boulevard.  The theatre entry is modest, facing the street so the queue forms outside.

Why did ISIS choose that place, a low-rent music hall, among all the gilded theatres of Paris?  Some speculate that the owner’s support for Israel brought down the wrath of murderers. http://historybuff.com/paris-terror-attacks-killers-target-bataclan-theatre/.  Maybe.  Was it American heavy metal?  Or Parisian nightlife? Perhaps.

I’m struck by the cruel irony that the architectural openness of the Bataclan made it vulnerable, while the same openness is our best defense against intolerance.  The Bataclan (meaning the whole caboodle) embraces the city and makes the boulevard into a public space – not just a street.  Its café turns outward to welcome all those who drink and chat.  The theatre has two entrances that flank the café, but only one is used.  They lead up to a foyer that looks back over the street with tall French doors and a long balcony where concert-goers might perch at intermission, or go for air when the music gets too thick.  The façade is bright and decorative.  Originally it had a Chinese kick to the roof, just to make it exotic, and three circular windows at the top.   The historybuff has an early picture showing the chinoiserie inside and out.  The Bataclan embodies the best French tradition of  urban architecture, with joy, urbanity and good humor.

Perhaps that also offends those who would control us.   

A good night at the Ba'ta,clan Café

Lincoln Road Oval Redesign: Kids and Parakeets

The Lincoln Road Oval (at Euclid Ave) is a Miami parterre covered in an astroturf carpet where kids romp and parakeets chatter overhead, even Discoman is there.
Here's a link to a video:  Listen for Parakeets

James Corner and Field Operations have proposed a new design to renovate Lincoln Road including changes to the oval.  Back in the summer, they proposed turning the oval into a fountain. Here's a link.   A number of people including me spoke with the designers about how popular the oval has always been as public space.  In particular we told them that about the children who love to race around and do their tricks on the astroturf where everyone can see them.   I also spoke of the parakeets that nest in the date palms surrounding the oval.

In late September Field Operations presented a revised scheme showing a play area for children backed by a much smaller fountain.  Better.  They listened.  Another link. 

However Lapidus, the master of designing spaces for people watching, still has some lessons to teach.  His oval is raised up about two feet higher than the pavement like a stage that is facing outward to Lincoln Road.  Someone on the oval can see whatever else is going on and can be seen by everyone passing by.  This is a thrill for kids who are suddenly at eye level with adults.  It also works for teenagers who like to lounge or picnic on the oval in a position where they can sit and still be at eye level with passersby.  The height makes adults sit down, usually on the rim with their feet on the steps.  Public space as an equalizer.  Sitting, they look outward toward passersby or turn around to watch their kids, sitting sideways on the rim.  This double view knits the space together, looking out and looking in, and it makes kids happier to play when they are watched only casually.

And parakeets chatter overhead.  They are the other residents who need to be considered.  Monk parakeets are the only parrots that nest communally.  They chose the grove of date palms for specific reasons: they can be together but spread among several trees; they are safe from ground predators; they are high enough to watch out for hawks; they are close to a ready food supply, the palm nuts, berries, and bird feeders of South Beach gardens.

I'm sure we can learn to design for all the animals, including kids and birds.



  

Old Ivy

Sunset Place about a year ago. 

The management at Sunset Place shopping mall in South Miami recently removed a creeping fig from the walls facing Route 1.  This kind of fig is an aggressive vine that can swallow up whole buildings in a season, but nevertheless I am sorry to lose that bit of subversive green.  The newly, sadly clean walls make me miss the romance of ivy-covered halls, which runs so deep in the academic tradition that only the most venerable schools bear the name.  Most of the League has long since banished the Ivy, but retains the hoary memory of a picturesque ancestry in the architecture.  The older buildings often have a rough surface that already suggests overgrowth, perhaps in overloaded detail, perhaps in the gnarliness of stone or the mottledness of brick.  In imagination, this roughness retains a natural condition, as if the building were only slightly removed from its origins in the rock and mud below it.  When ivy (or creeping fig) grows, it carries living part of the earth up the walls as if to reclaim them.  Building maintenance supervisors fight back with keen eye and sharp blade.  To let plants advance unchecked suggests an exquisite negligence or perhaps tolerance that remains part of the collegiate imagination.  Deep in ivy-covered walls, perhaps scholars like St Jerome in his study have more on their minds than pruning, and perhaps willingly make room in their world for other living things. In the presence of big thoughts, clean buildings seem rather shallow, and all the pruning and trimming obsessive, even violent.  When you think about it, a smooth surface doesn’t offer much to think about and requires a lot of repetitive work to keep it that way.

Stones and Trees

Dia Art Foundation planted trees in New York as part
of Beuys exhibition (http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/51/1295)

Recently the best architects, such as Herzog and deMeuron integrate plants into their buildings, for example the green wall by Patrick Blanc at Caixa Forum in Madrid, and the proposed hanging garden for the new Miami Art Museum.  Jean Nouvel included a similar green wall at the new Musée de Quai Branly in Paris.  These vertical gardens are works of art that require intense irrigation and maintenance because the plants must survive separated from the rich and complex dirt that supports most gardens.  Like hothouse flowers, they grow and change, yet not so much that they challenge the architecture.

Artist Joseph Beuys was a friend and mentor of Jacques Herzog and Pierre deMeuron.  Beuys argued that art could make real change in the world. In 1982, he undertook planting 7000 oak trees along the streets of Dusseldorf, each with a basalt stele planted next to it.  The trees grew, offering shade and life to otherwise barren streets, the stones weathered, sometimes supporting some small mosses and lichens.   As the trees grew larger every year in their cloaks of changing leaves, the life they supported on the street and in their branches also grows, while the stones seem to become smaller and less significant.  Beuys wrote,  “So now we have six- and seven-year-old oaks, and the stone dominates them. In a few years' time, stone and tree will be in balance, and in twenty to thirty years' time we may see that gradually, the stone has become an adjunct at the foot of the oak or whatever tree it may be.” (http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/51/1295). 

Are architects daring enough to risk bringing vigorous life into the midst of buildings, knowing that their stones will diminish in significance as life takes over? And are they then willing to have their weathered buildings stand even after the oak has lived its life and rotted, perhaps to feed another tree.  What significance then is the basalt, like a gravestone? 

Architecture for people on Lincoln Road (or not)

Here's a link to a video of me talking about Morris Lapidus' follies on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and other projects there.  It's about 6 minutes long.
http://youtu.be/QMkOsrf3LNg

There's something about Public Space

South Miami Farmers' Market in front of City Hall

Perhaps it’s a sense that one has a right to be there.  Perhaps it’s the knowledge that everyone has equal footing and that the social contract is forged by the community, not dictated by a landlord.  So everyone can stand up and breathe in their inalienable rights.  That’s a bit dangerous when you think about it.  What’s it like to have everyone feel they are entitled to do what they want - within the law, of course.  We expect people to act responsibly among their peers according to a shared set of social standards that we all learn as we grow up.  Police intervene only in extreme situations.

Shopping malls are private space.  They imitate publicness, but the rules are tighter so the space feels cloistered and safe.  Parents allow their teenagers to hang at the mall, because they trust security guards to keep the kids out of trouble - mall security in loco parentis.   In this sense, the mall offers an immature version of urban life, like a city with training wheels for those who are not quite grown up yet.  A mall is to the city, as Facebook is to the open web. 

Likewise the architecture of malls is immature.  Focused on shopping, malls are carefully designed to guide people, so every view they take in encounters something to see, which they might buy.  This narrow goal produces manipulative design that serves the city only as far as it must to gain acceptance.  Like the teenagers they attract, malls turn inward, away from the city, usually without depth, complexity or maturity.

So when do we get to grow up?  Where can we be full, responsible members of a complete community, free to cruise the street and cruise the web?   Where do we find mature architecture that treats us with grace, subtlety, and respect?  

Perhaps only by embracing the complexity of city streets and parks and plazas can buildings and people with many purposes interact with each other on the multiple levels of life.  That’s where design can act fully, humanely, and poetically.  The rest is just advertising.

Mr and Mrs. Macaw

Today a pair of blue and gold macaws banked in the sunlight just over our heads while my daughter and I waited for her schoolbus.  The yellow under their wings flashed gold in the morning light as they screamed, “Braaaak.”  A married couple, we sometimes see them cruising the city for fruits, which they found this morning in the top of a tree at the corner.  

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her husband biologist Steven Hopp traveled to coastal Peru then hiked through the rain forest for a couple of days to find macaws in their native habitat.   She describes the thrill of seeing 'pet shop' birds flying free on their own, simply living their lives.  They were easy to hear and hard to see in the dense canopy, until they flew together, like a motorcycle gang, out in clear air. 

People say the Miami macaws escaped from Parrot Jungle during Hurricane Andrew.  Perhaps.  But we’ve seen families with young birds flying in threes and fours, so they are established residents by now, making a living and raising young.  That makes them feral rather than stranded.  Seeing the couples flying together overhead braaaaking at each other is one of Miami's little bits of magic.